Item 1 Q2 – ‘Chunking’

06Nov

‘Chunking’ refers to the organisation of information into chunks in order to make it easier for out Cognitive brain to remember. As our Cognitive brain usually only remembers 4 – 5 bits of information at a time (Malamed, C. (n.d)) through ‘chunking’ or organizing information into groups we are able to remember more. For example, when remembering a household phone number we tend to break it into two chunks (0000-0000), rather than just a long line of numbers. We do this because it is far easier to remember two chunks of four, rather than eight individual numbers. The longer the list of numbers, the more chunks we break it down into (Chunking. (2010)). We often see chunking techniques being present in websites in order to effectively organize and communicate information that is ‘scannable’ to the reader. By grouping information together it is more organized, easier to find and is more likely to be remembered in these ‘chunks’ than if the information were to be scattered throughout the page. There are many different chunking techniques, such as organizing information in order of meaning, category or patterns so that, ‘when you find a pattern in information you just need to remember the pattern rather than a list of separate pieces of information’ (Chunking. (2010)).